WHITE BERRIES

We were still sleeping
when the sky fell. It drifted downward
like a vast silk parachute,
needled everything it touched
with splintery crusts of sky-stuff.
It must have moved as gently as bird wings,
to leave undamaged
such fragile traces of its pelt.
It coated the windows with crystal,
the ice on the lake
with static foam.

The berries are infatuated
with the color of the sky - -
they yearn for blue-tinged caps of frost.
(Or have they seen the pallid moon, coin of night?
do they want to replicate
her sharp-edged disc of white?)

See, there's jagged glass in the grass!
And the brambles mark with grizzled arches
their epiphany of white and grey.
The brown
of the first weeks of winter
is hidden by the sky's shed hair: sky white, sky bright,
you've paled all colors to your own.
How they love you, these drab branches
and shriveled leaves! Their new voices
are clearer than the belling wind
across the ice.

by Elizabeth Shura

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